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I’m not quite sure how I came about this episode in US history as I was googling for information about Chuck Hagel and the opposition of the Republican Party in Congress. In perspective, there are some parallels in history with the Bonus Army, General Smedley and the Business Plot to overthrow FDR.
The Bonus Army was the popular name of an assemblage of some 43,000 marchers–17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups–who gathered in Washington, D.C., in the spring and summer of 1932 to demand early cash-payment redemption of their service certificates.
Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each service certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier’s promised payment plus compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates.
Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most popular military figures of the time, visited their camp to back the effort and encourage them. On July 28, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shots were fired and two veterans were wounded and later died.
Bonus March on Washington, DC: 1932
Veterans were also shot dead at other locations during the demonstration. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the army to clear the veterans’ campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the infantry and cavalry supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.
Maj. Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler and Sgt. Maj. Daniel Joseph Daly: Each Marine has a strong claim to the title of America’s greatest fighting man. Between the two of them they were awarded four Medals of Honor, the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy and Army Distinguished Service Medals, the Haitian Medal of Honor and the Médaille Militaire, France’s highest combat decoration.
Smedley Butler was born on July 30, 1881, in West Chester, Penn. He was from a prominent Quaker family and would later earn the moniker “The Fighting Quaker.” His father, Thomas Stalker Butler, was an attorney, a district judge and a Republican congressman. Serving in the House of Representatives for 31 years, the elder Butler was chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs for most of the 1920s.
When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, young Smedley quit school and tried to join the Army and the Navy. Both services rejected him because he was still short of his 17th birthday. Lying about his age and wielding his father’s political clout, he managed to get a temporary wartime commission as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.
Smedley Butler served in …
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Philippines as a first lieutenant in April 1899
Boxer Rebellion in the attack on Tientsin, China
Honduras in March 1903 as captain, defend U.S. Consulate from local insurgents
Return to Philippines from 1905 to 1907
Expeditions to Panama and Nicaragua
Marines landing at Vera Cruz, Mexico
Peacekeepng in Haiti campaignDuring that period of foreign expeditions, Butler developed his high-profile and long-running feud with the upper echelons of the Navy Department. Later left for France in World War I as a lieutenant colonel. Butler received both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals, as well as the French Order of the Black Star.
More below the fold …
When the war ended, Butler returned stateside to assume command of the Marine Barracks at Quantico, Va., transforming what had been a temporary wartime camp into a permanent Marine installation. From January 1924 to December 1925, Brig. Gen. Butler was granted a leave of absence from the Corps to serve as director of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Safety, overseeing both the police and fire departments.
Returning to active duty in early 1926, Butler assumed command of the Marine base at San Diego, and a year later returned to China as commander of a Marine Expeditionary Force sent to protect American interests in Shanghai during a period of intense Chinese nationalist revolutionary activity. Not a traditional military expedition, this was among the first of what would now be called American peacekeeping missions. To the surprise of many, Butler executed his duties with great sensitivity and diplomatic skill. Twice the Chinese awarded him their ceremonial Umbrella of Ten Thousand Blessings.
In a January 1931 speech, Butler criticized Italy’s fascist prime minister, Benito Mussolini, recounting secondhand an incident in which Mussolini allegedly ran down and killed a child without stopping his car. President Hoover ordered Secretary of the Navy Charles Adams to court-martial Butler, who became the first general officer since the Civil War to be court-martialed. Public reaction, however, ran strongly in Butler’s favor, and he received only a formal reprimand. Butler retired from the Corps on Oct. 1, 1931.
No longer constrained by his active duty status, Butler became an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy …
Butler regarded his foreign service in the Corps, particularly in the Central American “banana republics,” as having made the world safe only for American big business.
Business Plot to March on Washington and Overthrow FDR – Butler and the Veterans
Despite Butler’s open contempt for big business, a group of wealthy industrialists in 1934 actually tried to recruit him to lead an army of 500,000 disgruntled veterans in a bizarre but half-baked coup d’etat plot against newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal social programs were anathema to many of America’s elite. Butler instead exposed the scheme and testified against the plotters during a closed session of the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities–also known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee. [Video]
President Roosevelt announced a ban on military exports to fascist Italy, he blasted the American Liberty League
Inspiration from Steven D’s The Pot is Boiling.
See my earlier diary – Kerry Distances Himself from Clinton on Syria.
